The ROCKPro64 is not super fast, but it is a pretty big step up from the Pi. 2 big cores and 4 little cores with 4GB RAM for $80. ~2800 geekbench multicore, Pi 3 is ~1400.

https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-c...

About $1000 will get you a Snapdragon 845 devkit with 6GB RAM which is again quite a bit faster. 4 big cores and 4 little cores. ~8500 geekbench.

https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-ki...

$6400 will get you a 96 core ARM server.

https://system76.com/servers/starling

$269 (+ $70-100 shipping) will get you a MACCHIATObin (+ a 4GB DIMM), a mini-ITX board with four A72 cores, PCIe and FOSS firmware (https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf... or even just mainline TianoCore) capable of running a graphics card before the OS (thanks to qemu).

https://www.solid-run.com/product/SRM8040S00D04GE008S00CH/

$300 for a tiny Kirin 970 board with 6GB RAM.

https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/

$1200 will get you a Developerbox, 24 A53 cores, also PCIe and FOSS firmware.

https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/

£2255 will get you a 32-core Ampere eMAG workstation

https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-workstatio...

You can also order a system from Ampere directly, no public prices but they might be offering 16-core systems for less.

https://developer.amperecomputing.com/resources/

A friend of mine is building a k8s cluster out of 4 gig Rock64 boards. Not terribly fast, but low power and fun for experimentation, I guess.

Just ran across your post. Coming over the summer we are releasing a mini-itx board based on https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/ That will be early release silicon. Production silicon will be end of 2019

The chip is 16 core 2ghz (maybe 2.2ghz for production), up to 64GB of DDR4

The board will be ATX PSU / 12v input 4xSATA connectors 1xNVME (x4 lanes) PCIe gen 4 x8 open slot (gen3 for LX2160A first silicon) PCIe add-in card 1x USB 3 in the back 2x USB 2.0 in the back 2x USB 3 header for front panel 2x USB 2.0 header for front panel 1xQSFP28 100Gbps cage (100Gbps/4x25Gbps/4x10Gbps) 1 1Gbps rj45 ethernet RTC battery Multiple FAN connectors; one of them with PWM / Tach USB FTDI USB to STM32 for remote management (on/off, remote SPI flash etc...)

The barebones board and COM will be sub $500. So adding all the bells and whistles you are going to looking at minimum $750 for a full working system. We have a proper Developer Workstation spec'd out in the $1300 range. Radeon GPU with multi-display support, 32GB of memory, 1TB NVME, nice looking compact mini-itx case, cooling loop etc.

Just for comparison a full ARM64 kernel build takes about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The same build on a ThreadRipper2 16 core / 32 thread takes 50 seconds. However the ThreadRipper is a 200Watt CPU and this is a 30Watt SOC

Just a little heads up that options are coming.

The MACCHIATObin Double Shot[0] from Marvell is reasonably fast. CPU wise it's twice the speed of a RPI, has two 10 Gb NICs, one 1 Gb NIC, 3 SATA ports, a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, in a mini-ITX form. I picked one up from Solid Run with 16 GB RAM for around $500 with the intention of making a desktop replacement to do all my online financial stuff on. Unfortunately the processor initialization doesn't configure large enough BAR space for video cards. A desktop like this has been done[1], but how was not publicly documented.

[0] http://macchiatobin.net/product/macchiatobin-double-shot/

[1] https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/10/03/macchiatobin-based-d...

You should use the TianoCore based firmware instead of the U-Boot it comes with. TianoCore even runs QEMU to emulate the VBIOS, so you should be able to get graphics before OS boot, like on a normal PC :)

https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-platf...

How to compile: http://wiki.macchiatobin.net/tiki-index.php?page=Build+from+...

How to run without flashing: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2018-October... (at the bottom) (tl;dr the 'bubt' command)

There are also jumpers for configuring where it gets the boot loader, so when I did happen to put a bad build into the SPI flash, it was possible to recover by using the SD card.

I'll have to revisit the TianoCore build as my previous attempts to use it were miserable failures. I assume due to the fact that my OS isn't arranged in such a way as to support EFI booting.

I would love to get it up and running as my gut feeling is that running on a platform that less than 0.0000001% of users are using insulates you from almost all automated attacks I'd encounter on the internet. The only thing I'd feel more secure using would be a Talos PowerPC based system, but those are out of my budget.

I read Linus's point as saying that the desktop/developer experience is what drives the adoptions, not the other way around. You want to be able to run similar stacks on both. So server can't happen unless desktop/laptop gets adoption first.

I for one would love to see an ARM desktop; I'm already a Linux user and I've largely stopped gaming so there's no reason for me to stick around x86 except that that's basically all I can get. Architecturally I find ARM much cleaner and nice to use, without all of the crufty 8-bit/16-bit/32-bit compatibility shims that we're stuck with because of the evolution of the x86-64 [ed: was IA64] architecture.

x86, not IA64. IA64 is the Itanium architecture.

Well, you can spend $1000 for an Atom-grade laptop with 8 ARM cores and 4GB RAM:

https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/02/12/ubuntu-linux-snapdra...

I think that is pretty much as good as they get.

> Atom-grade

Is this really the best ARM can do?

No but ARM is obviously not the go to thing for high performance computing (At the moment... Or forever in the near future)

Not for $500 [1], that one looks to be over $10000.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12571/gigabyte-thunderxstatio...

Not yet, no, but it looks like they're starting to creep up the value chain.